


Joyride

by foxsgloves



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura is former blue paladin theory, Gen, Let Allura Have Support and Joy In Her Life 2k16, Platonic Bonding, Soft Allura, bonding over dead dads and lowkey hijacking a space lion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-18 10:14:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8158529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxsgloves/pseuds/foxsgloves
Summary: Allura tries to hide when she's hurting, but Pidge has firsthand experience in grief. Pidge also knows that the best distraction is to break a couple rules. Taking Allura's old lion out for a secret midnight ride ought to be a good start.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Who else is thirsty for Season 2?! I'm so pumped for all the quality feelsy team moments we're going to get, but until then, here's a stab at some of that Pidge and Allura bonding time I've been craving like whoa.
> 
> Thanks for stopping by to read!

She’s forgetting what the flowers looked like.

She sits about their pale, poor imitations with the long hem of her nightdress pooling about her legs, cupping one in her palm.  It has the wrong amount of petals.  Was it four, or six?  This one has five.  With a sigh she lets it fall from her hand to join its brethren, scattered and trembling in a wind that does not touch her skin.

They are beautiful, her flowers, as false as they are.  The sight of it should stir her to something, move her emotions to bitter nostalgia, to painful grief.  And yet she sits, hollow, heavy, all spent, plucking flowers with restless fingers. 

With a startling flash, the door flashes and opens.  She closes her eyes, steeling herself for Coran’s fond scolding, but opens them to find not her retainer but Pidge, still in her armor, pushing up her eye-things to rub one bleary eye with a fist.

“Hey, Coran, where’d you put the—“ She drops her hand, eye-things sliding down lopsided on her nose.  “Oh.  Princess.  Sorry, didn’t know you were here.  Didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“It’s quite all right, Pidge,” she says without looking up from the empty palm of her hand.

“Up pretty late, huh?  You should take your own advice.  Get some rest.”

“Yes,” said Allura, stretching her mouth into what she hoped was a convincing smile.  “Rest well, yourself.  You’ll need it tomorrow.”

Pidge angles to slide back through the door, but throws a forlorn glance over her shoulder at the last second.  “You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?”

Allura blinks in surprise, and Pidge barrels forward into the silence.  “What am I saying?  Of course you’re thinking about him.  What else would you be thinking about?” 

“I was remembering my father, yes.”  His work-roughened palms against hers, fingers interlaced, as they raced through the clouds of flowers.  His straight back as he sat at the control console of the Castle of Lions, Altea’s last and final defense.  How the furrows about the corners of his eyes had crinkled with pride on the day she first took her seat as a Paladin of Voltron.

The way he turned back to look at her, before his stasis pod slid shut.

He had already been long lost to her.  It all ought to make little difference now.

Pidge presses her forehead into her hand.  “I, uh.  I didn’t have anyone much to talk to about it, when it was me.  But I wanted to.  That is, before I found out my dad was alive, so I’m not saying it’s the same, but...  If you… also wanted to, I could stay and you could talk to me.”  She squints into the following silence.  “Or I could just go, if you’d rather be alone.  You know, that’s probably better.  I’m gonna—“

Allura knows she ought to fake a second smile and turn her away.  She knows the fresh young Paladins needs guidance, steady guidance they can look to in a composed leader.  She needs to shape herself into a pillar for them, not lean on them.

And yet, she finds herself shifting and patting the patch of flowers beside her.  “Stay.  I would very much appreciate it.”

“Oh.” Pidge plops down, legs crossed.  “Okay.”

At a little twirl of Allura’s finger, the false sky purples and grows dim, speckled with stars.  Their shadows stretch longer in the grass.

“So what was he like?  Your dad.” Pidge leans back, hands braced around her ankles, taking in the false sky.  “It’s kinda weird, you know?  He was… here… the whole time, and I only spoke with him once.”

This had been purposeful.  Her father, even preserved as mere code, had been ashamed of his failure, full of grief over the loss of his people, his planet, his empire.  How strange, that the data was able to preserve a person so perfectly it could not take away their suffering.

“He was… he was a great leader, in every sense of the word.  A born warrior, of course, but the ship and sword were the beginning of his duty, not the end.  He knew every man and woman in his troop down to the family name, favorite mess food, their families.  He…” Her hands balled in the fabric of her nightdress.  “He took their losses very hard.  Even after so many years, he still felt grief so keenly.  Once,” she plucked a white flower from its stem, tracing its paper-thin petals, “one of his new recruits fell ill, and he remembered that she loved laceflowers—that’s these, right here,” she says in response to Pidge’s blank look.  “He sent them to her for her birthday.”

“He sounds like a great man,” says Pidge with a sidelong glance.

“He was.”  Allura feels the weight of his legacy pressing down on her shoulders like a mantle, pressing close like the walls of her sleep-chamber.  Had he lived, Alfor could have easily unified the new Paladins, formed a plan of attack against Zarkon, brought the Castle back to top fighting order.  He would have commanded with grace and assurance and serenity.

Had he lived, he would not have carried her doubt.

“I mean, all those things are great, but what was he like as your dad?  You loved him, obviously.”

“I… I did love those things about him.  And he always made time to love me.”  A different king, a different man, would also have left the raising of his daughter to his staff and servants, to see only on leaves and holidays to marvel at how she’d grown.

Alfor had done all of the growing himself.  “When I was a little girl, he would take me to the gardens to stargaze every night.  He was so tired.  Even as a child, I could tell how exhausted he was.  But still, he would take my hand and help me point towards all the places he had been to and seen.”

Leaning back, Allura traces her finger towards a dim red star near the horizon, to a cluster of milky little dots, to a comet blazing a lazy, frosty trail across the dark gulf.  “He always said I would see all those places for myself one day, when I was grown.”  She wipes a trickle of a tear from the corner of her eye with the heel of her hand and hopes Pidge doesn’t notice. 

“I know what you mean,” says Pidge.  “My dad always made me feel like I could do anything.  I was really mad when he and Matthew left me behind, you know, to go to space.  The day before he left, my dad told me I was destined for amazing things.  Things that would surprise even him.”  She shrugs her shoulders with a low, sardonic chuckle.

“He would be so proud, to see you now.”  Allura folds her hands in her lap.  “Just as my father was, on the day that I became a Paladin.”

“Whoa.  Hold the phone.”  Pidge holds up a hand.  “You were a _Paladin_?”

“Of course.”  Allura tilts her head.  “I thought I made that clear, in my stories.”

“What? Excuse me? At no point did you ever come out and say you used to fly a lion.”

Allura stifles a giggle at Pidge’s scowl and narrowed eyes behind her huge… eye… things.  Sight augmenters.  Glasses?  That’s what Shiro called them once, she thinks.  “What did you think I was here for?” 

But now that she thinks of it, taking in Pidge’s scrunched nose of confusion, she has to concede the point.  She does not speak of Altea often, let alone the life she once led among it.  She does not speak of Altea at all, can it be helped.  Only when her duties request.  Only when responsibility demands.

“I thought you piloted the castle! Just like you do now!”

“Alas, no.  That was… that was my father’s job.”

Pidge’s face scrunches up, presumably for having failed so badly at changing the subject.  “Which was one was it?  No, let me guess.  Black lion?”

“Wrong,” Allura giggles, though she supposes this is flattering.

Pidge ticks off a finger. “Red lion.”

“Wrong again.”  Allura sits up straighter, like she would have at the helm in her cockpit.  “It was the blue.”

“Really?” Pidge blinks, and Allura tilts her head with raised eyebrows.  “I mean, uh, nothing wrong with that, obviously.  I just wouldn’t have pegged you and… you and _Lance_ to have the same lion.”

Allura laughs.  “I wasn’t supposed to have a lion at all.  It was merely a formality when I sat for it, when the former Blue Paladin passed on.  I went first, you see, only because I was the princess.  But then it chose me, and everyone was so surprised!  Myself most of all.” 

She’ll never forget how the thrill of it chased up her arms when the living machine trembled and came to life beneath her hand.  She took it to the sky, hair streaming behind her, stomach turning flips, before the Altean master of ceremonies could even finish listing off her full name and titles, and not touched ground again until she’d made three circuits of the atmosphere.

“I don’t get it, though.  If you were its chosen, why didn’t you just pick it up again after you woke up?”

“Then one of you wouldn’t have been a Paladin,” she says after a pause.

“We could’ve settled it,” Pidge responds with a grimace.

“No, it was too late. After ten thousand years, our bond had been severed.”  _I’d been forgotten_ , is what she has to keep herself from saying.  “And it had already responded to a new pilot.  I doubt I even have the ability to fly with it anymore.”

This was not quite true.  Sometimes, in the depths of the night, she could still feel its whisper in the soles of her feet, the tips of her fingers.  Its comforting rumble about the edges of her dreams.

“And anyway, I am of more use flying the castle now.  It was made to respond to Altean hands.”

“Still, though.  No wonder you know so much about this stuff.” Pidge rubs at the back of her neck.  “I was never that good of a pilot, you know?  I was way better at computer stuff.  That’s why I even went to the Galaxy Garrison in the first place.  To use their computers.” She grinned.  “Legal or not.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear about this.”  Allura replies with a grin.  “I’m your commander.  You probably want to think twice before disclosing your checkered criminal past.”

“Oh, but I think you do, though.” Pidge flops backward into the grass with her arms splayed, her knees still bent.  “That’s what got me through it, you know?  Having something to work for.  Spending all my extra energy trying to think my way through the Garrison’s firewalls—which are _really_ bad, by the way.  I can’t believe they pay their IT guys.”

Allura gives her a sidelong glance.  “Are you suggesting that perhaps I’d feel better if we held a stick-up at the local galra trading station?”

Pidge pushes herself back up on her elbows.  “Um, not exactly?  We can work up to your own breaking-into-the-Garrison-moment.  Maybe start small.  Cracking a little firewall.”

Pidge’s eyes grow wide and gleaming with what Allura is sure was a bright, shiny new idea.  She’s already familiar enough with Pidge to know such a thing is dangerous.  “I got it.  You need a _joyride_.”

Allura rejects this with a wave of her arm. “I can’t exactly take the Castle for a spin about the closest sun, you know.”

“No, not the Castle.  Your Lion.”  The fake starlight flashes across Pidge’s glasses as she pushes them up her nose.  “Take it for a spin.  See if you can still fly.”

Allura squeezes her eyes shut, watching the afterimages of the imitation starlight pop and blink in empty space.  Her fingers itch to close around the acceleration stick, feel the lurch in the pit of her stomach as she banks into a hard turn, hear the high-pitched whine of the laser cannon.

“But the Castle.  I can’t leave the Castle undefended—“

“Coran can watch the castle.  He has Altean hands too, y’know, and I’m pretty sure he’s awake.  I could smell something in the oven.  Something… gross.”

Allura plunges on, utterly unconvinced. “And anyway, if Lance—“

“Lance is a real heavy sleeper.”  Pidge’s impish grin suggests she’s tested this personally.  “And besides, he won’t mind.  I mean, if you wake him up and ask him, he’d probably fall all over your feet telling you to take his lion out anytime you want.  And his other lion too, you know, the one that’s in his—“

“Stop! Not another word!” says Allura, waving her hands with a flurry of giggles she can’t fight.  “I suppose it… might be nice.  To feel like a Paladin again.”

“Then let’s go!” Pidge hops to her feet, offering both hands to pull Allura up.  “I’ll distract Coran.  Set his his food on fire or something.”

Distracting Coran proves to be necessary, as when he’s not puttering about the kitchen he’s wandering the halls, hands clasped formally behind his back, which Allura and Pidge can see from the inch-wide crack they’ve opened in the door.

Allura ignores the little twist of guilt in her gut as, with a start, he dashes off towards a stream of smoke leaking from the kitchen and the smell of something truly disgusting in its fiery death throes.  She pinches her nose closed.

“I didn’t know the doors could be programmed to do this,” Allura says as they nudge it closed again.  “Or that it was possible to hack the oven remotely.  I thought you were joking about burning his food.”

“I’m a girl of many talents.” Pidge cracks her neck to the side, stretching her arms out in front of her.  “Okay.  Ready to make a run for the hangar?  A sneaky run, that is.”

“I’m your commander.  Since when did you start giving the orders?”

Pidge points a thumb at her chest.  “Hey, I’m the resident expert on criminal activity here.”

 “A good leader knows how to delegate,” says Allura with a sigh as she tucks her hair into the neck of her nightdress. 

She has to hike up the skirt and tie it about her knees to hide the soft, slithering sound it makes on the castle’s metal floors, though there is no one to hear it.  In truth, it’s probably completely unnecessary for them to tiptoe about like this, but she can’t help the childish thrill that runs down her spine as they dart around corners and scuttle down stairwells. 

She used to play games of hide-and-find with the other pilots’ children, when she only reached her father’s knee, and similar games with her Paladin companions as a new recruit, with the stakes considerably raised.  Perhaps she ought to make her own charges run through similar exercises, now that they had grown into the roles.

She’s deep in planning a particularly vicious training regimen involving laser shock guns, ankle weights, and a complicated point scale when she nearly trips over the smallest of her mice, little blue Ani.  Ani squeaks, indignant, hopping onto the toe of her slipper. 

It’s a warning.  She has only two precious seconds to grab Pidge by the back of the neck of her armor and duck into a nearby supply closet before Coran stalks by, grumbling to himself about burnt goo and a princess who doesn’t seem to understand the concept of sleeping at night.  She smothers a laugh with her hand and scoops Ani up to place on her shoulder, hidden within her hair.

“Nice save,” Pidge whispers with a thumbs up when he’s passed out of view.

After the initial excitement fades, Allura finds herself feeling altogether too silly. “I can’t believe I’m sneaking around in the night in my own castle, trying to avoid my royal advisor like a girl trying to fool her nursemaid.”  Allura shakes out her skirt.  “This is ridiculous.”

“Of course it’s ridiculous.  That’s the _fun_ part.”

Pidge gestures for her to go ahead and take the hangar zipline, but Allura turns up her chin, braces one hand against the tunnel’s wall, and with a push glides into a slide down the chute on her slippers.  “Sweet,” she hears Pidge whisper behind her.

Her left leg slips out from under her and she wobbles, throwing her arms out for balance, just as Pidge calls “Look out below!” as she slides by on her back, arms crossed over her chest like an Altean mountaineer going down a snow-slide.

Pidge skids to a sideways stop right in front of the exit, so of course Allura, arms flailing, catches a toe on her leg and falls right over.

“Oof,” says Pidge, untangling their legs.  “Sorry.”  She glances up at Allura’s red-cheeked, tight-lipped face and twitching ears with a grimace, but Allura can’t control her puffs of laughter, and collapses onto her own ankles with one hand pressed against her chest.

Pidge, grinning in relief, offers her a hand, which she clasps, and they stand and face the Blue Lion. 

With the echoes of their laughter gone, the Lion’s chamber is black and silent, with all the solemnity due one an interstellar empire’s proudest creations.

Now is when she ought to realize the utter foolishness of this.  Turn around, return to the lit corridors, bid goodnight to Coran so he won’t worry, thank Pidge for her thoughtfulness but assure her it was not necessary and that she would be not inviting any more ideas of mischief, thank you very much.

The last princess of Altea, the commander of the Castle of the Lions, final hope of her people, final hope of the universe, about to hijack a Voltron Lion to—what?  Take it out for a spin?  Childish folly.  She’s not a child anymore, not a paladin anymore.

But how she had loved flying. 

She hasn’t flown since she awoke to this new, changed world, not once.  And the Blue Lion knows it too. She can feel its vibrations in the back of her head as it wakes, stirs.

She steps forward.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she warns Pidge.  “It may be completely beyond response to me now.”  After all, it’s spent weeks in the company of its new master without a hitch of complaint.  Without more than a glimmer of a stir whenever she passes close to its docking bay.  Maybe it would better if nothing happens, if it turns away from her touch.

She reaches out her hand, and as her fingertips meet smooth, cold steel, the eyes flash, washing the bay in yellow light.  The legs shudder, the tail twitches.  The entrance ramp thuds against the floor of the bay with a crash.

“Well,” says Pidge, rubbing her sore backside, “Looks like that isn’t going to be a problem.”

Allura lingers on the ramp, brushing a hand along the length of the back of the pilot’s chair before taking her seat.  It feels wrong to take her old place without her armor, with her loose hair drifting about the edges of her vision like a cloud.  The pilot’s chair has contours she was never able to feel before, now an unfamiliar annoyance through the thin fabric of her nightdress.

Pidge, at least, thought to wear her armor, and helpfully opens the hangar doors from a command in her wrist interface.  Not standard access.  Allura raises her eyebrow over her shoulder and Pidge shrugs one shoulder with an embarrassed little half-grin.  “So are we gonna fly this is thing or not?”

Allura reaches for the control panel, then draws her hand back as if shocked.  “Wait.  The Castle’s on night cycle. If I launch now, the breach alarms will active.  The other Paladins will be called to their battle stations.”  She ought to have thought of this earlier, if only she had actually expected to get this far.

“Um.  No, they won’t.” Pidge waved her left wrist.

Allura’s eyebrows pinch together. “You and I are going to have a conversation about this tomorrow.”

She heaves a long, deep breath and holds it, narrowed eyes on the glittering void now just out of reach beyond the yawning hangar doors, and curls her fingers around the left accelerator. 

The machine stirs to grunting, whirring life beneath her feet, the command screen spinning and whirling with glowing, fragmented streaks of Altean.  She lets her held breath escape through her nose.

In the back of her mind, beneath her breastbone, she can feel it speak to her, a low and familiar rumble.  To her, it’s been weeks.  To it, it’s been millennia.  But still, though the bond between them has frayed, it holds together by a few single, stubborn strands.  And she can understand it perfectly.

_One last ride._

“You and me, Blue,” she whispers.  “Let’s make it count.”

She pushes the accelerator to its limit and in a single, fluid leap, Blue twists like a corkscrew as it takes flight.  Allura’s slippered feet knock against the floor, her hair shaking loose from her collar, Ani clinging to the fabric of her shoulder for dear life and projecting a powerful air of wounded indignation.  With a cry, Pidge lurches across the cabin, grabbing for the back of Allura’s seat.

“That was fast,” Pidge says, breathless as she tucks her glasses back over her ear.

Allura lifts her hands away from the controls to crack her knuckles.  “You think that was fast?”

They drift in a neat circle around the station.  “Don’t forget.”  Pidge plants her feet, gripping the back of the pilot chair as she points towards the castle.  “I silenced the alarms, but if Coran’s looking out a window he could still see us.”

Allura leans forward in her seat.  “I trust you disabled the motion sensors too, while you were at it?”

Pidge rolls her eyes. “Please.” Allura fixes her with a stare.  “Um, that means yes,” she responds in a smaller voice.

“Then that’s taken care of easily enough,” says Allura, and initiates the interstellar launch sequence.

The Blue Lion rockets forward, pressing Allura back in her seat.  Pidge wobbles with a grunt, but keeps her feet, as Allura can feel the pressure of her grasping fingers on the back of her seat. Blue settles into its motion, smooth and fluid, the visual display edged with a pale blue aura.  Should Allura look at the rear cameras, she would see a streak of blue light in its wake, like the tail of a comet.  Her heat leaps into her throat, fluttering in excitement. 

“I gotta say, interstellar travel with you is a whole lot better than my last trip with Blue,” says Pidge, letting up her deathgrip of Allura’s chair.  “Sorry, Blue.”  The Lion ripples with what might have been something like laughter.

“We’ve had practice.  It isn’t used often.  It’s not very efficient, compared to the Castle’s generators.  But there were a few pinches I had to make use.”  The battle against the Castoran insurgents, for one, and breaking the blockade of the old siege of Balmera. 

Allura had not been a Paladin long, but she had still seen her share of conflict, even in the more peaceful times of ten millennia past, and it had been a point of great contention.  The life of a princess was priceless.  The life of a Paladin could be expected to be laid down for the good of the allied planets, if necessary.  The people of Altea had a difficult time reconciling the two.  Even her father.

“How are you navigating?” Pidge leans over Allura’s shoulder, squinting at the display.

“There’s a star chart, if needed.  But not for this part of the universe.  I remember.  And so does Blue.”  The lion kept its course with only a few minimal nudges of her assistance.  If there was one thing Allura can count on in this changed world, it is the predictable dance of the stars.  The universe has not grown enough in ten millennia for her to lose her way.

Still, she breathes a small sigh as the moon Massalia rises into view, its surface still furrowed like a cracked blue egg.  “I used to train here.  Uninhabited, with plenty of water.” 

Pidge resumes clinging to the pilot chair.  “Uh, you’re flying right for a block of ice.  Just thought you’d like to know.”

With a grit of her teeth, Allura directs Blue into motion, but its beating her to it, settling once more into their patterns of old. Blue’s tail lashes forward and unleashes a burst of its blue-tinged laser, its familiar whine droning in the back of her skull, just as its mouth yawns open for a triple blast of the sonic cannon.

The ice bursts like a white flower opening, great clouds of steam and smoke and mist swirling up to meet the lion.  For a moment all the display screens are blanked out, nothing but a white so brilliant Pidge squeezes her eyes shut and Allura shades her own with a hand.  And they meet the surface of the water with a shudder and a thunderclap, trailing a froth of bubbles.

Under Allura’s hand, Blue straightens its course into a sharp dive, tail whipping back and forth. Pidge stands up straight again.  “You know, these things really oughta have passenger seats.  Can we add that?”

Blue’s speed is barely cut by the resistance of the water.  They meet the depths of the moon’s hidden ocean in short order, Blue’s lights raking across the rocky ocean floor, and Allura presses a hand to her mouth.

At her last visit to this planet, the ocean floor was mere bare rock, league after league of featureless grey splintered stone.  But now beneath the shelf of ice is a trove of hidden life.  Great fronds of pale plants waving in the wake of Blue’s passing.  Little darting things no bigger than Allura’s palm with reflective, colorless eyes.  In the distance, vast shadows undulating what might be long ruffled fins, or perhaps tentacles.

“ _Cool_.” Pidge leans so close to the screen her nose nearly brushes it.  “Hey, look!  Those guys are bioluminescent!”  She points out a cluster of round blobs suctioned to a spike of rock, softly glowing a pale pink, then a dull red.

“This… this wasn’t here before,” Allura says softly.  As she watches, a burrowing shell-creature breaks free from the sand, shaking off glimmering grains before scuttling away on a muscled foot.  “And none of it should be here.  Ten thousand years is not long enough to support the growth of new life.”

Pidge adjusts her glasses.  “Maybe it’s not new.  Maybe it’s like… seeding theory, or whatever it’s called.  When displaced life adapts to a new environment.  Something brought them here, and they’ve just… set up shop.”

“That… is possible.”  Allura raises her hand to brush her fingertips against the screen, where a long, thin creature slithers along, propelled by translucent, pearly wings. 

Pidge points off into the distance.  “Is that a whale?”

“I have no idea what a whale is, but I say we go and find out!”  Allura presses forward, and Blue surges through the water, startling a host of the darting creatures into hiding.

Some of them, though, are curious about Blue’s light, and press close around the viewscreen. Pidge holds Ani up in her cupped hands to squeak in return with excitement.  Allura weaves around and under the huge undulating things, which Pidge declares with disappointment not to be whales, but still pretty great, and between the grasping arms of the dancing pale plants and billows of steam vented from the cracked floor below. 

It’s an exercise in piloting dexterity in itself to keep from crushing some poor unsuspecting sea life whenever Blue braces its legs into the ground for a forward push, which she does in silence, her lips quirking into a grin as she twitches back and forth in her seat.

She glances at the ticker display on the command controls.  “Hold on, Pidge.  Time to surface.”

“Aw, do we have to?  I think one of those guys is doing some kind of dance for us.”  Pidge waves at one of the long winged fellows.

Allura lifts Blue into a steady ascent.  “Time to see what we came here for.”

“What we came here for?”  Pidge wrinkles her forehead.  “Okay.  I’ll bite.”

The ink-black depths yield to grey, then blue, then finally a milky paleness filtered though the ice.  Allura aims for the spot they entered, where a handful of icebergs bob in a hole of debris.

“Now’d be a good time for that laser,” Pidge suggests helpfully as Allura takes aim right towards one of the larger floes.  “I mean, now.  Now is good.”  Allura pushes forward on the accelerator.  “Now?”

“Just watch.”  At Allura’s command, a new console slides open, revealing a trio of blue buttons, which she taps in quick succession.  Blue opens its jaws.

“Are you going to ram it?  No offense, but I’m not sure if that’s advisable, Blue’s durability isn’t really— _Holy crap is that a mouth sword?!”_

With a ring and a flash, Blue’s teeth part to reveal a shining blade which cleaves the ice floe neatly in two, and Allura allows herself a single, cut-short shout of triumph.  They wheel up into the sunrise, the new light striking the glassy surface of the ice to ring with dazzling gold and blushing peach, eye-searing white and deep, tranquil pink, glittering off all the tiny shards of melted dew clinging to the icebergs.

Allura closes her eyes against the brilliance.  As the light fades, she guides Blue into stillness, hovering on the edge of the horizon.

“This place was one of the first things my father told me about when I was a little girl.  So naturally, it was one of the first for me to visit on my own.” 

Pidge rests her chin on her hand, looking past the moon’s rim into deeper space with a wistful frown. “Think he’d like it now?”

She can imagine the way he would have clapped her shoulder and twirled her about in delight.  “He… he would have loved to see it like this.”

With a dip of her chin, Allura wheels Blue about.  “We’re going to find him, Pidge.”

Pidge looks away with a watery smile.  “I know.”

They glide along in orbit for a handful of ticks until the light flickers and fades.  “And now,” says Allura, “I believe I was going to show you _fast_.”

Pidge tucks Ani against her chest with her thumb in the air as Allura urges Blue into a dive and a twirl before bursting once more into a blazing blue comet.

She takes the long route back to the hangar, dragging out every spare tick of her last flight in loops and hard banks and charges back and forth, until Pidge’s face begins to look as green as the accents on her armor.

Pidge crosses her arms on the back of Allura’s chair to rest her chin as she finally, with heavy hands, turns back towards the open hangar.  “Not gonna lie.  I’m no pilot, but I know good flying when I see it.”

“Of course you’re a pilot.”  Allura scoffs.  “You should bring Green here sometime.  Take the others.  Make it a training exercise.”  She lifts her hands from the controls, the joy and adrenaline already leaking away from her fingers, and bunches them in the skirt of her nightdress instead.

Allura lingers once more on the threshold of the boarding ramp.  She’s become so used to trying to turn her back on the past, stride forward into the new future without any glances snuck over her shoulder.  Loss cannot touch her if she loses herself in her new duty.  Grief cannot catch her if she soldiers forward, steady and without exhaustion.

She thought she could forget how much it drags at her steps to also turn her back on the things she so desperately loves.

“Thank you, Pidge.”  Pidge’s eyes widen as Allura clasps a loose, hesitant hand around her shoulder.  It’s the first time they’ve touched, Allura realizes with surprise.  The Paladins exchange easy hugs, shoulders over arms, clasps of the hands, but not she and they.  Not until now.  “I mean it.  I’m honored to count you among my Paladins.  And also among my friends.”

Pidge turns rosy up to her hairline.  “Um, no problem,” she mumbles.  “Call me anytime you want to get up to some shenanigans.  Or just… hang out or something.”

Allura blinks. “Hang out what?”

“Nothing.  It’s a figure of speech.  Spend time together.  Braid our hair and tell each other secrets.  That kind of thing?”

Allura clasps her hands with excitement she can’t be bothered to check any longer.  “Can we really?”

Pidge points at her head.  “I don’t really have hair, but the rest of it, sure.” 

They take their places clinging to opposite ends of the zipline, which bears their combined weight with a groan of complaint.

“Lance is gonna go nuts when he figures out the mouth sword.” Pidge chuckles.

“Do you think he’ll notice?”  Allura tried to leave Blue in the same position she found it in, but it isn’t quite perfect, and she left the navigation stick askew.

Pidge scoffs.  “No way.  I used to move stuff around in our dorm room while he was asleep and he never noticed.”

Allura giggles.  “Well.  I wanted to be prepared if he shows up to breakfast tomorrow yelling about someone messing around with his joystick.  The one in his lion, not the one in his—“

Pidge snorts, nearly losing her grip on the handlebar as they ascend back into the castle, to the lights flickering on at the end of the night cycle and the vaguely unappetizing smell of Coran’s latest breakfast effort.

**Author's Note:**

> If the 2016 Blue Lion doesn't have the mouth blade like the 80s one I'll be real salty. That's just too good to pass up.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed!


End file.
